Recalling the shame of Willowbrook

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Willowbrook State School was officially closed in 1987, after abuses at the school were revealed in the 1970s by Advance reporter Jane Kurtin and others, including Geraldo Rivera . The school's former grounds were redeveloped extensively to serve as the campus of the College of Staten Island, which opened at the site in 1993.

Nona Brathwaite:An unimaginably brutal childhood
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- "They called me monkey, ugly, one-ear, gorilla," said Nona Brathwaite. "They called me one-half side."
"They" were staff at the old Willowbrook State School, located on the grounds of today's College of Staten Island. Nona was placed at Willowbrook in 1956, at the of age 2-and-a-half, after a medical treatment gone horribly wrong left the right side of her face and body deeply scarred and her mother full of despair.
She would live there for the next 23 years.

"They said I was mentally retarded," said Ms. Brathwaite. "I would ask them why did they use that term, mentally retarded, for people like me? I think it was so they could get money from the state for me being there. That term makes me feel very low. It makes me feel degraded."
Nor has she ever thought of herself as "learning disabled," another term that has been applied to her perhaps, if for no other reason, than because of the facial disfigurement she suffered as an infant.
Growing up in Willowbrook, during the 1950s and '60s and well into the 1970s, as Ms. Brathwaite did, was "horrible" beyond measure: She was beaten with a broomstick, made to kneel on the floor for hours on end, left naked in a dark room and injected with powerful drugs to keep her in a state of submission.
All, she said, for "misbehaving ... for standing up for myself, for saying the way they treated us wasn't right."
Also, for asking to go home.
Three years before Ms. Brathwaite's journey began at Willowbrook, she had been born with a large cyst on her face. Doctors in a Brooklyn hospital told her mother it was probably cancerous and needed to be removed through a radiation treatment. She was just 3 weeks old.
"My mother said I screamed very loud," said Ms. Brathwaite. "They over-radiated my face. It took off the outside of my right ear. It damaged the ear, but I can hear. It damaged my eye; I'm blind in my right eye. It damaged my stomach, my leg, my lung. My whole right side."
She was transported to the burn unit of a Manhattan hospital, where she spent the next two years of her life, much of it "wrapped like a mummy."
"They gave me treatments and they also gave me tests to see if I had any type of retardation, or if I had lost anything developmentally," she said. "But there was no sign."
Nor was there any evidence that she ever had cancer.
"They should have done a biopsy, but they didn't," said Ms. Brathwaite. "What they told my mother was, 'There's been an error.' They told her, 'Don't worry, we will take care of her all of her life.' That the hospital and the state had gotten together."
It was at that point that she was taken to Willowbrook, where her mother would come to see her on visitation days, on Wednesdays and Sundays.
"Even though I was young, I always knew that my surroundings were different; different from what they should have been," said Ms. Brathwaite. "I knew it wasn't home because of the color of the walls. I knew that none of the people taking care of me were my parents."
"After I saw myself, I asked someone, 'What happened to me?' I must have been 5 or 6. I knew that I looked different from the other kids. They all had both ears. She took me by my hair and she said, 'Oh, don't worry about it; you're ugly anyway.' I told her, 'I want to go home,' and she said, 'This is your home.'"
"We girls were dressed in thick dresses; the boys in overalls," Ms. Brathwaite said. "You'd have the same underwear on for a week. If your toothbrush went missing, they'd want you to use someone else's toothbrush. You couldn't have anything of your own, because someone was always taking it. You'd sleep in a dormitory and you'd all shower in one big shower. The food was disgusting, but if you didn't eat it right away they'd take it from you and say, 'I guess you're not hungry.'"
She cried frequently. 
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SUB: HARSH TREATMENT 

"I got hit if they thought I misbehaved," said Ms. Brathwaite, "or if I said I wanted to go home. One time I got hit across the face with a broomstick. It was like my face was a ball and the broom was a bat. Once in the winter time they put me in a dark room. They left the windows open. I was naked; just the way I came into this world. When they came in, they said, 'Why did you wet the floor?' I said, 'Because you wouldn't let me go to the bathroom.' They beat me with a belt."
"Sometimes I couldn't stand up, they would have me so heavy on sedatives," she added. "They would give me Thorazine to calm me down; Mellaril to keep me knocked out."
"I always had a willingness to learn," said Ms. Brathwaite. "They taught me to read, but I read just enough to get by. The state promised my mother I would get sent to a school off the grounds, but that never happened. My spelling is poor. I know basic math. I would love to learn computers."
In 1977, she landed a day job with an employment guidance service, returning to Willowbrook in the evenings. She left Willowbrook for good in 1979 when the building she had been living in was closed under the state decree that phased out the "warehousing" of persons with developmental disabilities.
She moved to a group home, but had to give up her job to battle a myriad of medical issues, all stemming, she believes, from her exposure to radiation and her life at Willowbrook.
"I have asthma, lung disease, high blood pressure, multiple things," said Ms. Brathwaite, who will be 54 next month. For years she has lived on her own in West Brighton, making ends meet on Social Security. She attends Mount Sinai United Christian Church in Tompkinsville, likes to cook, especially breakfast, loves to crochet and thinks she would enjoy taking a knitting class. Also, she has been dating a "very nice" man for the last three years.
"He wants to marry me," said Ms. Brathwaite. "He does not like to argue or fight and he doesn't drink. But I'm not ready for marriage."
Said Ms. Brathwaite: "If I hadn't been in Willowbrook, my life would have been very different. I would have liked to have gone to college, and learned to read better than I do, so that I could get myself a nice professional job. People have asked me, 'Why didn't your mother sue the hospital?' But she wasn't strong enough. For years she told me I was in a fire, to explain the way I look, before I was able to get ahold of my file and read it -- which you weren't supposed to do.
"When I was younger, and I would go home sometimes on the weekend, when we would walk down the street, she would either walk way out in front of me, or behind me, or to one side or the other. When I got older, a year before she died, I told her, 'We need to talk about this.' I told her, 'Don't be ashamed of me; I am your child.' I told her, 'You did the best you could.' When I said that to her, I could tell that something lifted inside her."
Judy L. Randall is a news reporter for the Advance. She may be reached at randall@siadvance.com.